


The Time of Drawing

by Jormandugr



Series: Gone From The Window [2]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Multi, NaNoWriMo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:13:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27550576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jormandugr/pseuds/Jormandugr
Summary: Once she was the girl at the window, then the widow, then the gunslinging dealer of death. Now Susan Deschain finds herself an eternity away from where she started, on a beach on the other side of the world, facing down a door that cannot be there. The time of Drawing is at hand.A full-length AU exploring a level of the Tower where Susan survived and took up the quest.
Series: Gone From The Window [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1176431
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. Setting the Deck

**I**

The sea tossed and roiled like a living thing. No wind touched her skin, but the waves crashed and foamed and thundered silently, cast in the uncanny light of the pink and bloated moon. The boy’s hand broke the surface, his white-gold hair plastered to the face that bobbed among the teeth of the water, his mouth opened in an O of fear and accusation.

 _He drowns, gunslinger. He drowns, and no-one throws out the line_.

She struck out for him. She had never had much call to swim, and the pink-sheened depths sucked at her, dragged her down. She couldn’t reach him. Wouldn’t reach him. Didn’t want to reach him. As her mouth filled with water, she felt a strange relief. It was right that she should drown, sinking with the boy in this cold and moonlit water, into the endless depths where betrayals and loss and loves meant nothing.

Something was wrong. It came to her slowly. The sound – the sound was wrong. Not the deep and sonorous whisper of an endless depth, but the hoarse rasp of stone and sand. It made her think of the mouth of the Clean Sea, when she had been a child. Perhaps she was the child. Perhaps that was why she was drowning. But if she was drowning, then why did the land sound so close? And why did it feel…

The cold water crashed against her legs and crotch, icy and aching, and Susan’s eyes flew open all at once. Not drowning, but dreaming – and now awake, wide awake, and galvanised. It wasn’t the cold water that shocked her to stumbling, stinging wakefulness, or the memory of the dream, or the horror that watched her from nearby. It was her guns – her guns, and, more importantly, the shells in them. Wet guns could be dried, disassembled and oiled and dried and oiled and dried again. Wet shells might never fire again.

She scrabbled back up the beach, bootheels scraping on the coarse sand and splashing in the surf. Her legs were numb, the denim of her jeans heavy and sticky with salt. It was like moving through tar. From her right, the horror continued to watch.

The horror was a black and crawling thing that made her think half of the lobsters she had seen in the Clean Sea as a child, half of a cockroach, and entirely of disgust. It was around four feet long and segmented, dragging its gleaming and hideous body along the beach with large, wicked-looking claws. It regarded her with bleak, blank eyes protruding on their stalks, and from its long, serrated beak came a strange, insistent, questioning sound, uncomfortably like human speech.

 _Did-a-chick_? it enquired. _Dod-a-chum? Dod-a-chuck?_

It didn’t seem afraid of her at all, not even when she dragged herself up on her elbows and, with a herculean effort, hauled her numb and aching body a few more inches up the beach, collapsing into the dry sand. It watched incuriously, and Susan watched back, gathering her strength.

A moment before the next wave came, as it began to break against the pebbles and Susan made one last desperate attempt to outrace the water that would damn her, she saw the horrible thing stop, rearing up with a click and chatter of its beak, and raise its claws as if in defence towards the rising foam.

 _It hears it_ , she realised dimly. _Whatever the fuck it is, it has ears_. But she didn’t have time to dwell on it, and in the moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she not be caught again by the rising tide, that the saltwater should not reach her shells.

She didn’t quite make it out of reach of the next softly whispering wave, but good enough. It only reached to her knees this time, filling her boots and dragging at her legs. _Mayhap it’s not so bad as I thought_ , she thought, as she dragged herself a little higher again, dimly aware that she was moving in just the same way as the horrible, segmented thing watching her. _I was asleep. Not thinking straight. Could be it didn’t reach as high as I thought._

The moon overhead was a sullen crescent behind clouds, not so vast or so bloated or so sickly bright as it had been in her dream. It wasn’t enough to see much, but it was enough to tell, with sinking dismay, that the holsters slung at her hips were dark with water. The guns, at least, were wetted. And the shells, carried cross-ways on the belts? Some might be, some might not. She didn’t look forwards much to finding out.

 _Dod-a-chuck?_ It was closer now, only a couple of feet away. It looked at the gunslinger, pulled itself a few more inches. Its strange, almost-human voice was plaintive as a child. It twisted up like a scorpion, segmented body curling, but she saw no stinger.

She snorted. “Aye. And a did-a-chick to thee.” The creature was little to her. The water was what mattered. Another of those grinding, whispering roars was growing, louder than the last, a new wave beginning to break. The creature immediately stopped, raising its claws like a boxer again. Susan grimaced, and moved to drag herself out of the foaming wake of the tide.

As soon as her outstretched hand slapped down on the sand, the creature moved with a speed she would not have thought possible. Numb, red-hot agony exploded from her hand, and even as she screamed, she still scrabbled with her wet bootheels and both hands, determined to pull herself out of the water which lapped now around her ankles.

“Did-a-chick?” the thing asked again, in that soft and plaintive way, as the remnants of her first two fingers vanished into its horrible, serrated beak. Its claws clicked, its beady eyes fixed on her as if begging for her understanding. She lifted the dripping wreck of her right hand just in time to avoid its second lunge.

It did her one favour, at least; it gave her, in that explosion of pain and horror, the surge of adrenaline she needed to finally come, stumbling and unsteady, to her feet. Her legs were numb and uncooperative, threatening to buckle under her. She commanded them to do as they were told, and stumbled back a step, almost falling right back onto the shingle and sand. That would kill her, she realised, with dim fury that burnt almost as hot as the agony in her hand. She would die here, torn apart on the edge of the world by a clicking, questioning thing that sounded like a lost child.

“Did-a-chum?” _Help me. Why won’t you help me? Can’t you see that I need you?_ The horror lunged, and its beak tore through the leather of boots that had carried her across decades, through the faded denim of her jeans, and into the taut muscle of the calf beneath. Her legs were no longer numb enough to disguise the pain.

Blood slimed the wet leather of her holster, a discordant note in the familiar dance of drawing. She drew left-handed instead, and staggered back, far slower than the monstrosity could move, firing.

 _Click. Click. Click_. The shells in the chambers, at least, were dead.

“Fuck _you_!” she snarled, and deep in her gut, felt the urge to hurl the weapon from her – this weapon that had betrayed her after all these years, that might be nothing now but dead weight, that would not save her from her long quest ending in stupid, banal bloodiness on a beach. This gun that had not saved Roland, had not saved Patrick, had not saved Jake, would not save her.

Something deep and childish inside her rebelled at that. “ _FUCK YOU_!” she yelled again, her voice harsh and cracking, like the caw of the seagulls. She yelled it at the sea and the sand and the mountains behind her; yelled it at the agony in her hand and leg and at the creeping horror readying to lunge again, clearly having decided she was easy meat; yelled it at the world and the past and the future and the Tower beyond. She had the clarity to do one smart thing: before reversing the gun in her hand and smashing it down as hard as she could on the creature’s segmented back, she transferred it to her right hand. It made it hard to grip, made the swing weaker, and the stumps of once clever fingers screamed pain louder even than her rage, but when the thing jerked and spasmed and bit, it took off the pinky of a hand that was already useless.

Its beak scraped the steel barrel of the gun, with a sound like a scream. Susan raised the gun – the great ironwood grip worn smooth by centuries of hands, the last remnant of the Eld and the world that was, the only trace left of the great gunslingers of old – and smashed it down again. She had collapsed from where she started, down on one knee, and now found herself on the thing’s level. Four foot long at least, and not a shade below seventy pounds, she would guess. It made another, abortive lunge at her as the waves crashed around them.

The freezing water was only splashing her, now. She no longer cared about it, and felt she might not have cared even if she had been neck-deep in it. All she could think was red and blind and furious, and all she could do was raise the heavy gun and bring it down again, and again, and again. At one point, she heard a click duller than the breaking of the thing’s carapace, and realised dimly that if by some fluke a shell had survived, she would just have shot herself in the stomach. Somehow, that still felt better than stopping.

It took another lump out of her arm, a bloody, jagged rent that went almost to the bone. By now, she could see the thing’s guts, grey and black, spilling out onto the wet sand and washing into the shallow draw of the tide. She screamed at it – no words left, not even _fuck_ – as the gun fell from her suddenly nerveless wreck of a hand. Then she was on her feet again, stamping and stamping and stamping, dancing a bloody and deadly jig there on the surf-washed sand. It no longer bit, but she felt its beak drive through her boot and into the sole of the foot inside, pain jerking up through her already throbbing calf. She gritted her teeth around the yell that was still more fury and hate than pain, and went on stamping.

What finally stopped her was not the thing’s abortive failure to drag itself away, or even the moment that she saw the pale bone of her own severed fingers in the dark and shifting mash of the thing; it was the coming of the next wave high enough to reach the bloody, ichor-smeared gun dropped in the sand. The horror was now barely a coherent shape at all, smeared among the rocks in fragments of its own shattered shell, but it still managed to snap at Susan’s whole left hand as she snatched up the pistol.

“Fuck you,” she told it, one last time, through hoarse and panting breaths. Her mouth was dry, filled only with the taste of salt; somehow, she still managed to summon enough moisture to spit. The gun’s ancient ironwood handle was dented and scratched, a chunk broken away under the slick blood and fluid that drenched the whole thing. She almost dropped it again returning it to its holster. “Fuck you, you bastard thing. This ain’t how I go.”

Her purse was still lying where she had awoken, now almost covered by the water. She grabbed it up, one eye still on the twitching remnants of the thing – waiting for it to move, to reform itself and dart for her – and retreated up the beach, step by aching step, boots slipping on the wet sand and stone. By the thin light of the moon, she saw more of the same monsters, great dark shapes in the water’s edge, clicking and clacking and asking their curious, concerned questions.

She didn’t let herself collapse until her torn, dripping bootheels reached the thin crabgrass of the dunes, until the stones beneath her were dry and the inquiring voices of the things had faded. In the deep shadows, she could just barely see two or three of them converging on their fallen comrade, pausing at each wash of the tide to raise their claws.

She looked away when they began to eat, although the light was too poor and the scene too far to be clearly seen. The rage had left her, and now there was only the pain, screaming and twisting in her ruined grip, and the sickness lurching in her stomach, and the despair.

 _This ain’t how I go_ , she thought again, and fumbled for her tobacco pouch to try and stem the bleeding. There was so much blood. More blood than there had been at Jericho Hill, she thought, and realised from the thin and distant flavour of her thoughts that she was passing out. More blood than there had been when Patrick was born. All that blood, oozing from the trigger hand that had saved her so many times, wetting the salt-dry sand of the dunes. All that blood.

She had time to think _fuck, if those things come up the beach, I’m a goner_ , and to throw the last of her tobacco clumsily onto the wounds, and then she was gone. The moon, which was not pink, shone down on the soft waves of the dunes, and the gunslinger did not dream.

**II**

To her surprise, she woke up. That, in itself, was miracle enough that someone more prone to fancy might be inclined to believe in a God. Susan believed in nothing, in that moment, but the furious pain that ran like molten steel from her outstretched hand.

A seabird regarded her with sharp, curious eyes, and hopped closer. When it pecked at the raw meat of her hand, the gunslinger found the strength to cry out and jerk her arm, and the gull, startled, flew away shrieking in impotent complaint. Susan pulled herself, inch by dizzy, agonising inch, into a sitting position, and squinted at the world that was, inexplicably, still there.

It was morning. The crawling things, whatever they had been, were gone. The rising sun turned the endless sea to a blinding shiver of light that reached out into forever. Susan had been born by the sea, lived all her childhood with the knowledge of that eternity of water, but that was thousands of miles and who knew how many centuries of arid trail behind her, and in that moment, the sight of it was a wonder almost great enough to kill the dizzying ache of her arm.

Almost.

With reluctance, she looked away from the gold and silver of the gently lapping waves, and turned back to reality. The reality was that she should be dead, and soon might be. The reality was the arm she now held cradled against her chest, black and stiff with crusted blood and sand, and with barely more than a fraction left of the quick, clever fingers that knew their trade so well, or of the taut and wiry strength that had brought her all this way.

First things first. The arm, no matter how insistently the ghosts of its losses clamoured for attention, could wait. First was taking stock.

The jawbone she had taken from the man in black, back in that high golgotha in the mountains, was still there, tucked into her back pocket and miraculously unbroken. Her purse was salt-drenched and damp but still there, and still full. The empty tobacco pouch lay in the shingle beside her, where she had let it drop. She returned it to her purse, digging out a piece of jerky while she was in there, and chewed slowly as she began, clumsy with pain and with the loss of one hand, to unbuckle the gunbelts from around her hips.

The gun she had used against the lobster-thing, the one in the left holster, was hard to draw. It had been glued into place with the sick, dark paste of her own blood and the creature’s, which had seeped into the already wet leather of the holster. Grimacing, Susan held the belt down with the palm of her ruined hand, willing back the nauseous lurch of agony this sent through her, and pulled the weapon free.

 _Fuck_ , she thought, and there was something almost of humour in it – a sharp, bitter humour, one that carried a note of despair, but humour nonetheless. _It’s going to be a long day’s cleaning._

For now, she swung out the chambers – difficult, since they too were gummed thickly with that crust of violent remnants, and for a horrible moment she was sure she had clubbed the thing so violently as to bend the metal out of shape, but just as that certainty gripped her, there was a sudden crunch and the hinge shifted – and removed the remaining, ruined shells. The empty guns she placed on top of her gunna; the shells, sodden and useless, she placed into a small, neat pile on the crabgrass.

The belts were next. She could still see where the leather had been wetted, the darkness of the soft, long-worn belts, the rills of salt settled on their surface. With her jaw set, she began to remove the shells which were not visibly touched by the water, those which had sat highest on her hips. It was slow going. Her ruined right hand twitched in her lap, much as the creature had twitched as she backed away; over and over again, she had to tell it to lie still, that it could not be any help to her. But her left hand had never been as clever as the right, and what should have been a fast but grim task stretched out eternally.

At last, she had a small pile of shells that might, if she was lucky, be good – or might not. No way to know but to try, and she didn’t look forward to that trying. Beside it, she piled those from the chambers and from the salt-drenched lower parts of her belts, the ones she was sure were fucked. To her dismay, that pile was a good deal bigger.

Twenty rounds. If she was lucky, she had twenty. Almost twice the number were ruined. _Twenty rounds, from here to the Tower_. The thought struck her with curious force, and she looked down again at her black and crusted arm, with its hot ache pulsing sickly through her. She threw back her head and cackled. _Aye, from here to the Tower, with no trigger finger, and a hole in your leg. Two thousand rounds wouldn’t be enough_.

Still, twenty rounds was more than none. She wrapped them in the driest thing she could find, which was her kerchief, and tucked them carefully into the top of her purse.

There was nobody on the beach but her and the gulls, which hung back and watched her with suspicion, no doubt waiting to see when she would fall again. But they wouldn’t be able to take her guns without difficulty, nor her purse, and so she left both where they lay, pushing herself painfully to her feet and staggering down the beach.

The saltwater stung worse than anything she had ever felt, and as she washed off the thick crust of filth from her injuries, the wounds began to bleed again, sluggish for now, thin crimson threads shivering into the foaming water. She tried not to think about the poison that the thing might have had, or the dark and ugly red swelling of her denuded hand. What mattered was that she get it cleaned, and seen to, and wrapped. The saltwater might do the wounds no good, but at least once she had cleaned off the clagging, heavy shell of dried blood and salt, she could take the measure of them.

By some miracle, she stayed conscious long enough to do so, even against the furious roar of pain in her ears and through her bones, even as she paled and swayed at the violent sting of cold salt against raw and burning flesh. An even greater miracle befell her as she turned to limp back up the shingles – the sight of her waterskins, somehow against all odds snagged among the rocks and not taken by the tide. They were even whole, when she picked them up, and one still had a little fresh water sloshing in it. Standing there in the surf, blood and saltwater dripping from her ruined hand, Susan took a long draught of brackish water from the first of the two skins, and for a sweet and too-brief moment, felt the life flow back into her.

Alas, with that life came clarity, and with clarity came even greater pain. She let out a low, sobbing breath as she wrestled the lid back onto the skin, and began the long, dragging way back up the beach, drops of pink-threaded seawater soaking into the sand in her wake.

She collapsed a few feet short of where she’d left her things, dropping the waterskins beside her, and looked down at the wreck of her strong hand. In the daylight, with the worst of the muck washed away and the tattered remnants of her sleeve pushed back, she could see the full extent of the damage. The first two fingers of her hand were gone entirely, the raw flesh red and puckered, splinters of bone visible through the mangled meat of the stumps. The pinky was missing, too, along with much of the outside edge of the hand. Only her ring finger and thumb were largely whole, and the former showed a deep scrape where the thing’s beak had passed. Below her wrist, a jagged hole opened like a cave mouth, a great bloody absence reaching to the cracked bone underneath.

“Shit,” she said out loud, in a voice she didn’t entirely recognise, and with a grunt, began to tear a long strip from her threadbare shirt. Her left hand was clumsy, her movements unsteady, but she kept at it, slow and determined.

When she was a girl, she remembered – when she was a rancher and not a gunslinger, when her father was alive and things were almost steady – there had been a woman in town who had caught her arm in the laundry mangle. Susan had been a child then, and it felt like it might have been centuries ago, but she still remembered how Betty Carvozo had screamed so that it echoed all up the Drop, how her father had helped to hold her down while they took off the mashed and useless limb.

Her arm looked like Betty’s had looked then. Not crushed, perhaps, but every bit as ruined. Maybe, Susan thought abstractly, she ought to take it off, too.

No. Even if she could, even if she had the tools and the strength to use them, no. Betty had died nonetheless, rotting from the elbow up, and if Susan was going to die that way, she might as well do it with both arms.

 _Too bad it took the fingers, so you can’t flip this bastard world off on the way out_. The thought came to her with such shocking bleakness, and such bitter truth, that she couldn’t help but laugh. At least she still had that. No right hand to speak of, no water, no guns, and no future – but as her father might have said, if you can still laugh there’s not naught. She wasn’t sure this had been the kind of laughter he had in mind.

She wrapped her hand as tightly as she could bear, gritting her teeth so tight against the pain that she could feel it right to the crown of her head. By the time she had seen to that, and packed and bound the hideous gash in her arm, her shirt was almost gone, down to a ragged ribbon that barely covered her sagging tits. She considered for a moment, then stripped the remnants off altogether, buttoning her vest back over the sweat-stained, fraying cloth that bound her breasts. The wet leather would chafe like a son of a bitch, but that was the least of her worries.

She rested a moment when it was done, catching her breath and pushing down the hideous pain that reached its scorching fingers up her arm and into her chest, as if it might claw for her heart. Then, gathering up what was left of her shirt, she crawled the rest of the way up the beach to where last night’s blood still left a macabre marker in the sand.

The guns. She had put it off long enough already. She might have defended herself with the reminder that promptness had already been lost, that one more hour on top of however long she had been unconscious would do little harm, but she knew that wasn’t why she had left the most important task of all to last. It was more than that. It was shame. As she began to disassemble the less-damaged gun, the one which had stayed in its holster, she felt a sick shame that was almost as strong as the throbbing pain in her arm.

 _You are not a gunslinger_. Cort had told her that, and he had not been the first or the last. She had spat on the thought, ground it into the mud with her heel. But he was right. She had never been a gunslinger, never truly understood the ways and traditions of the men who he had taught. She was not a noble-born man bearing his father’s guns, a remnant of an old and noble tradition. She was a desperate girl who had taken what she must to survive, and that was all. A gunslinger would have seen to the guns before himself. A gunslinger would have kept them clean, kept them safe.

She traced the mark of the Eld carved into the ironwood of the second gun, and felt a lump in her throat at the harsh, splintered edge where the monster’s beak had done what years of wear could not. The smooth curves of the sigil, carved who knew how many centuries before, were marred now by a deep split, a rough canyon carved into the polished wood. Susan felt a lump come into her throat, even as she forced her left hand to keep doing its clumsy, unsteady work, to limp through the hours of a task that should have been the work of a moment. The guns could be cleaned, could be dried and oiled and dried again, and they would work again, they would fire as they always had – but that sigil deep in the wood, that ancient relic of a world that had never been hers, that last remnant of an extinguished bloodline, that would never be restored.

 _Roland_ , she thought, and bit down on the inside of her cheek. _Roland, my dear, my love. What have I done?_

**III**

She was not, however, a woman given to sentimentality. That had been part of her, once, but the gunsmoke and the desert had scoured it out of her. She did not have the luxury of grief – not over the boy she had killed under the mountains, not over the corpses littered along her trail behind him, and certainly not over a hunk of wood and iron. She would not allow it.

So she cleaned the guns, and dried them, and oiled them, and dried them again, and by the time it was done, it was almost night again. She loaded the chambers with shells from the pile that might have been good, and holstered them, and – with difficulty – buckled them back over her hips. It struck her that there was really no sense in carrying both, when she would never fire two-handed again. Still, with a gun at each hip, she felt more like herself, more brave and more able to stand. Perhaps there was some sentimentality not burned out of her yet, after all.

She took the wetted shells, as well. She didn’t know why, only that after all this time of living on nothing, it was hard to leave anything behind. So she wrapped them in the last of her shirt, and stuffed them down deep into the bottom of her purse, and only then did she leave the black stain of her resting-place, all too aware that she had been lucky to survive one night so close to the shore where the crawling, questioning things were once more starting to emerge. On the top of the dunes, under the shadow of a leafless and unlovely Joshua tree, she settled back on her haunches, watching the sun go down, and considered what came next.

There was no question of staying where she was. She had not come so far, lost so much, and taken so much only to sit down and die here. She might as well have died under the mountains, if she did that. She might as well have stayed on the other side of them, where she and the boy might have eked out a life, where she could have grown old and tired and watched him become a man.

No staying, then. East was back; west was only open water. So: north or south?

Her heart said north. Her heart had betrayed her with mistakes too many times, since she was only a girl, but it said north, and that was all she had to go on. North. For all it mattered, for however far she might get before the fiery red of infection she had seen in her hand reached her heart… north.

She rested perhaps an hour there under the Joshua tree, gathering her strength, and then she stood, the evening air cool against her bare belly and throat, and began to walk.

**IV**

She walked for two hours, or so she judged by the rising of the moon. It was hard going, not only because she kept one eye on the wine-dark sea and its monstrous dwellers, not only because she stuck to the dry, scrubby parts of the beach where the going was harder and the dunes steeper, but because with every step the pain in her bandaged arm grew. It felt like each limping, jerking step slammed the raw flesh of her hand against a wall, and it was enough that it would have wearied her at the best of times. This was not, of course, the best of times. She was sickening, hungry, thirsty. There were a few mouthfuls of water left in the skin, but not enough to waste a drop. Her unconsciousness had not been true sleep, and she had not rested properly in… how long? Since she came down from the mountains, perhaps. Since her long palaver with the man in black, when she had, it seemed, slept a decade and change.

That ought to be enough, she told herself, for a lifetime. But it was _not_ enough, and with each dragging, effortful step, she felt the weariness and dizziness settle on her like a shroud, pulling her down. After the third time she fell, tripping over a stone unseen in the thin moonlight, and bloodied her lip, she gave in to it.

She would not sleep. Could not risk sleeping, with those shelled things creeping on the shingle, chattering in their strange tongue and, she was sure, watching for her. She had decided, under the Joshua tree, that she must move by night and sleep by day; from when she woke to when the sun went down, she had seen none of the ugly, plaintive lobstrosities that now swarmed the shoreline. They seemed, then, to be night-dwellers. She could not sleep while they were out, so she would walk then.

For as long as she could walk. She had made it perhaps two miles in those two hours. She might, if she was lucky and stubborn, make it a few more miles the next night. A few the next. And after that? When the water was gone, and the infection that twisted and bit at her arm had done its work? Already, as she hunkered down on the edge of the dune and longed with all her heart for a cigarette, she could feel fever-sweat prickling at the nape of her neck, running down her back under the old leather vest.

It didn’t matter. She would walk until she could no longer walk, and then she would crawl, and when she could no longer crawl, she would drag herself inch by inch until the infection or the thirst or the creatures took her. She would have tried. She would, she was sure, die trying.

But for now, she sat, and watched the dark waves rise and fall against the dark beach, the dim shapes of the lobstrosities raising their claws in that strange salute each time the surf rasped against the stones. She chewed the last of her jerky. It, like everything else, tasted of salt.

There was, she thought, something fitting in the whole matter. She had begun her life on the Clean Sea, with nothing but her father and her pride, out there where the green sweep of the Drop met the endless water; and for all her life, she had been walking away from that beginning, knowingly or no. She would end it at the other side of everything, still walking. And would her bones one day be washed so far that some part of her might be swept up in the bay where once a golden-haired girl had ridden the Silk Ranch Road behind her father’s saddle?

She didn’t know. But, as the morning drew closer and sleep unwillingly claimed her, she found she hoped so.

**V**

She slept well into the next day, and awoke with a sunburn to add to her woes, her arms and chest and belly all blistered with it. It wasn’t the sun, though, that brought the sweat she found herself soaked in or the deep heat of her cheeks. That she could tell by the shivers and shakes that racked her, the dizziness that plagued her, and, most of all, by the virulent red lines that now ran up her bare arm, darker even than the sunburn and tan, reaching up to the shoulders.

 _I need medicine_ , she thought, but of course there was no medicine. Hot on the heels of that, another bitter thought: _I need a smoke_. There was none of that, either. She grit her teeth, and on the third attempt, stumbled to her feet.

The going should have been easier. In daylight, she walked on the beach, which was flatter and steadier underfoot; she could see where she was going, even if the landscape swam and drifted as if it, too, was made of water. But every step seemed to be harder than the last. Her leg wasn’t so badly hurt as her arm, but nor was it healing, and the deep gouge in her calf pulsed with malign heat, threatening to buckle every time she put her weight on it. In all that long, aching, endless afternoon, she thought she was lucky if she had made it more than a mile. And she would make it no further, because now the sky was beginning to darken, and she had to turn to her right, stagger back into the dunes, into that harder terrain, because she might be dying, but she meant to do it on her own terms, and not at the whim of those things in the surf.

By the time she gave up that night, she was no longer walking, but crawling. Her body no longer seemed to be her own; it was just a clamour of raw nerves and aching weariness, a weight that dragged her down. She recognised, as if from a great distance, that she was at the end of her strength. It had been considerable, it had carried her out of a dying town and out of a dying world, it had brought her further than anyone would have thought possible, and now it was done.

Not for the first time, she remembered her father. His kind eyes, creasing at the corners; his red thinking pipe clenched between his lips; the way his weathered face softened as he looked down at his only child. _You’ve learnt to keep going, Sue, but that’s only the half of it. It’s time. It’s time to lie still._

The tears mixed with the fever-sweat on her face. She stumbled unsteadily onto her knees, and went on crawling.

Time drifted. She must have slept, because it was morning again and she had dragged her dying, shivering, sweating body only a few hundred yards further. Now it was another face that floated before her, a pinched and sour woman whose dark hair was pulled up so tight it dragged the frown-wrinkles almost out of her brow. _Clever girls go to Hell_ , Aunt Cord told her _. Always told’ee so. For love, I told’ee so._

“Fuck your love.” Susan’s lips barely moved. The same enervation that filled her whole body had stolen her voice. But Aunt Cord hadn’t been wrong. Clever girls went to Hell, and Susan had gone there at sixteen. After all these decades, all these miles, all these sorrows, wouldn’t it be easiest to let herself leave Hell and go to whatever came after?

She stopped, but only long enough to drain the last contents of her waterskin. It did nothing to slake her raging, furious thirst, but it gave her the determination to force herself to her feet again, weaving like a drunkard as she staggered through the sand.

Half an hour later, she fell again, and knew in the pit of her stomach that she could not get back up. Her good hand was bloody from her falls, from pulling herself along the jagged shingle. Her bad hand, tucked inside her vest to keep it out of the way, had bled through the bandages, making the skin under her vest a swamp of sweat and blood and pus. The skin of her shoulders and neck, and all along both arms, drew back on itself in peeling, blistering sheets. She was, she thought bleakly, dead already. She had been dead for days.

 _Lie still_.

At last, she did. She lay on the rough stone and sand of the beach, in the lee of the mountains that had taken her Isaac, and she waited. The seagulls crowed and settled, took off, settled again, closer each time. _A sweet morsel I’ll make’ee,_ she thought, and hacked out a low laugh. _There’s something in that, at least. Something in that._

From the corner of her eye, she saw something.

At first, she thought it was a mote in her eye, a trick of fever and light and a dying mind. Then, rolling laboriously onto her side and raising her head, she saw that there really _was_ something there. What it was, she couldn’t tell. Something that stood proud of the beach, upright and straight. She couldn’t begin to guess how far it was, or how big, or anything so useful, but it was there. When she blinked, it remained. When she moved her head, she did not move.

 _It’s nothing. Nothing that matters to’ee, anyroad_.

But it _did_ matter. It was the only thing she had seen since the Joshua tree which stood tall in this wasted, clean-scrubbed landscape. It was something. Something, in the middle of nothing.

She found herself standing. Found herself staggering, with all the grace of a newborn foal and all the energy of a dying nag, step by step down the beach. A new strength, one she hadn’t imagined possible, carried her for a good few yards before she fell again. A long, lank strand of white hair had worked its way loose from her braid; it fell across her face, swaying and sticking to her fever-slick brow as she somehow, miraculously, found her feet again.

Lie still. Sure. She would lie still, and rest, and let death take her. But she would do it in the shade, and she would do it knowing what she was looking at. She would not die asking questions as plaintive and as pointless as the night-time wildlife. _Did-a-chick? Did-a-chum? What stands there? What if I reached it?_

She fell again, and this time could not get her feet back under her. So she crawled again, and at last as the sun began to sink from its seemingly eternal noontime height, she raised her head and saw what it was she had been looking at, what salvation she dragged her broken, weary body towards.

It was a door.

It made no sense that it was a door. There was, so far as she could see, no wall for the door to be set into, nor had there ever been. No jamb, no sill – just the door, standing like a tombstone in the empty sand. Nonetheless, it was a door. The early afternoon sun gleamed off the polish of hinges and knob. When she drew closer, inch by painstaking inch, and blinked the sweat out of her eyes, it continued to be a door.

 _Oh_ , she thought, almost with relief. _I’ve gone mad_.

But she kept on moving, dragging herself now over the green-black wash of kelp that marked the tideline, scraping her hand and her knees and her boots on the stones. Madness, it turned out, eked out just a few more hours of life. Madness, that strange and inexorable fascination of the door that could not be real but stubbornly refused to disappear, kept her moving. Curiosity, too. _Always was a woman’s sin_.

It was coming on for three in the afternoon, she thought, when at last she reached the door. It was… a door. It stood impossible and solid in the grey grit of the beach, and it cast a shadow in the west-wandering sun, and when she touched it, it felt like a door. It looked like a door; she could see the grain of the ironwood, the gleam of hinges seemingly fastened to nothing, the hazy reflection of her own face in the plate of the handle. It was just a door.

 _I’ve gone mad_ , she thought again. This time, there was no _almost_ ; it was a relief, plain and simple. To die here with her sanity intact would be the worse fate. Her mind, she thought, was giving her an escape. _Clever girls go to Hell, but the_ really _clever ones find a way out again._

The door did not budge when she leaned against it. She felt the handle turn under her hand as she pulled herself up by it, but although the door shifted slightly ( _Against what? It’s hinged to nothing_ ), it didn’t open. Not yet. Still, there was no keyhole in the gold shine of the knob, or above it, or below it. The door was not locked. Susan knew, and did not question why she knew, that it would open when she tried.

She was scared, she realised, with that same detachment. The fear sat in the pit of her belly, cold in the shivering heat of her fever. Perhaps she wasn’t dying as fast as she had thought, if she could still be scared.

The door was a good foot taller than she was, she guessed. Six and a half foot, maybe seven. It had no frame, and, just as she had thought, no suggestion that there had ever been one. The knob under her hand was filigreed into a design she recognised, one that had haunted the back of her mind since the man in black had turned over that third card. A grinning baboon, the same that had straddled the young man on the card. _A trifle upsetting, isn’t he?_

About two-thirds of the way up the door, something was written in the High Speech. Susan’s High Speech had always been limited, her reading of it worse, but it didn’t matter. She had known what it said as soon as she saw the handle.

**THE PRISONER**

A wise woman would have paused, perhaps, to question this. A wise woman would have investigated further, perhaps opened the door a crack and looked through, perhaps taken time to gather herself and make her strength. A wise woman would have waited.

Susan Deschain was clever, but not wise. She opened the door that could not be there, and the salty grit shifted as it swung on hinges that were fixed to nothing, and without giving her curiosity the luxury of caution, the gunslinger stepped into whatever was on the other side.


	2. The Prisoner

**I**

She did not fall.

This came as something as a surprise, since in the moment before stepping through, all she had seen was how _high_ the door was. On the other side, she had seen the sky, and she had been _above_ it, looking down at an earth uncounted fathoms below, and she had fully expected to end her life with a long drop and a hard landing. But she didn’t fall.

In fact, she was sitting. Sitting on a kind of padded bench like you might find in a carriage, looking out of a window. The window was, indeed, impossibly high. Its rounded edges were white, neither metal nor wood but something smoother and duller than either.

As a child, she had ridden Pylon across the hills, urging the big bay to ever greater speed, and she had felt the wind in her hair and the rush of the sky around her, and she had watched the crows wheel overhead and dreamed of flying with them. It had been a simpler time, a more innocent time. She had believed in dreams then.

Somehow, now, decades later, she was in one.

The gunslinger leaned against the window, looking down at the distant carpet of land. Something nagged at the edge of her mind, something about the blurred reflection of her face, but it was washed away by the wonder of the sight. They were higher than the crows had ever been, she guessed. Above the clouds, which passed beneath her like wisps of winter breath. Above the mountaintops, if there were mountains in this place. Flying higher than a condor, far, far above any beach and any chattering, questioning creatures with toothed and grasping beaks.

The thought filled her with a sudden uncertainty. She turned her head, looking back over her shoulder, suddenly sure that the door would be gone, and with it, the road she had been on.

The door was still there, and still open, standing in the aisle of the queer, enormous carriage. None of the strangely-dressed passengers who sat around her, dull-eyed and incurious, remarked on it or even glanced at the strange, impossible window in the middle of the metal tube of the carriage. Through the open door, as if someone had taken a knife to the scene and cut out a square of some other picture, she could see the beach. Her own body was crumpled at the lintel of the door, thin and limp and old. The sun was still high, but moving west; the shadow cast by her own body was longer already, as evening began to come on.

 _I’ll have to go back,_ she thought, and wondered at the absurdity of it. _Go back and move myself, before nightfall_.

It turned out to be easy. Easier than she’d imagined, actually. Her body didn’t move, but she stepped nonetheless, and was back through the door, back in her own crumpled and aching form, lying on the shingle and watching as, with a curious lurch, the view of the sky-carriage shifted and jerked.

 _Eyes_ , she thought, and felt something click into place. _I was looking through someone else’s eyes._ In that moment, it didn’t seem all that strange. It seemed right. The oddness of the reflection, the way her pain had subsided when she stepped through, the sight of her own withered form behind her. She had, for a moment, been someone else.

It struck her that this was another thing she had wanted ever since she was a girl, and she couldn’t help but laugh.

**II**

She did not step back through the door. Not for the moment. Instead, hunkering back on the beach and gathering her senses, she simply watched.

She had half-expected the door to try and close behind her, had groped her hand up to its edge to stop it from slamming, but it was unnecessary. The door stayed open, and the impossible window into another world remained right where it was, hanging in the air.

A woman approached. She was slender and trim, dressed in what seemed to Susan to be some kind of military uniform. A collared shirt, a cravat, a trim red jacket – and _pants_. The pants were a surprise. Even Susan, who had worn the same jeans for half her life and rarely been seen in a skirt since she was twenty, had never seen a woman wear pants like those. Pants that were actually cut for her shape, for a _woman’s_ shape, which gave space for hips and narrowed at the waist, which did not sag awkwardly at the front in anticipation of a cock that wasn’t there. _Women’s_ pants. Dimly, Susan found herself thinking, _Wonder if I could get me a pair of those_.

The woman herself was light-skinned and slender. Her face was heavily made-up, but with the same ruthless sharpness with which her auburn hair had been curled and pinned up at her nape. She looked at Susan – _no,_ Susan thought, _not at me, there’s no way she sees me and still looks so calm_ – with a lipsticked smile that the gunslinger recognised at once. She thought that any woman would recognise that smile, at once confident and doubting, wary without even being conscious of the wariness, calculating risk in every moment without remembering you were doing it.

It was not a look, despite everything, that Susan had ever seen aimed at her before. She realised then what she should have realised before: the eyes she was looking through, the eyes which the uniformed woman met with detached and wary warmth, were the eyes of a man.

**III**

Eddie Dean was having a bad day.

This was, in retrospect, not surprising. When a junkie was off the stuff, when he was trying to hide the churning nausea in his belly and the itching up his arms, and when he was on a cross-country flight from the Bahamas on too little sleep, a bad day was likely. When that junkie was also carrying two pounds of pure, weapons-grade cocaine in his armpits, it became inevitable.

But there were bad days, and there were _bad days_. This day was, he reflected, worse than either of them.

He didn’t know what was happening to him. Had he fallen asleep? He must have done, although he didn’t know how – not with the creeping, antsy need running in his blood, and the fear rolling and biting in his guts – because when he glanced down at his watch, he’d lost ten full minutes.

 _So you dozed off,_ he told himself. _Chill, Eddie. Keep yourself together. People sleep on planes._

But there was more than that. He _knew_ there was. Something itched at the back of his brain, and it wasn’t just the monkey on his back. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong indeed.

_Of course something’s wrong. You’re hauling two pounds of coke through U.S. customs and staring down the barrel of federal charges. Does that sound enough like something wrong to you, buster?_

“Sir?”

The stewardess sounded concerned. Concern was very much not something you wanted to hear in an attendant’s voice at a time like this.

Eddie cleared his throat, his tongue darting out to wet his lips, and tried to replay what she had just said to him. “Gin. Gin and tonic, please.”

It was probably the only way to make things worse, going through Customs drunk – and he knew that once he started drinking, he would keep on drinking. He ought to stay sober, stay _cool_ – but he was rattled, and he was seeing things out of the corner of his mind, and anyway, a guy in his position needed to have _something_ to take the edge off. A guy who was not cool, because he was cool turkey.

That was a Henry Dean special, that one. They’d been sitting together on the balcony of the Regency Tower, in the sunshine, back in those good old days when Eddie had only just started snorting and Henry had yet to pick up the needle, and both of them had been stoned but not totally lost, and Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie, had turned to Eddie with a look of great seriousness and told him that before you went cold turkey, you had to go cool turkey.

 _In some ways, cool turkey’s a lot worse than cold turkey, little brother_ , he’d said, there in the sunshine when everything was still a possibility. _When you get to cold turkey, at least you KNOW you’re gonna puke, you KNOW you’re gonna shake, you KNOW you’re gonna sweat until you feel like you’re drowning in it. Cool turkey is, like, the curse of expectation._

And then Eddie had asked what you called it when a needle freak (which, in those sunsoaked balcony days, they’d both sworn they would never be) took a hot shot, and Henry had said _You call that baked turkey_. And then he’d laughed the sudden, uncomplicated laugh of someone who’s made a joke much funnier than they expected, and Eddie had laughed too, and they both took another bump.

Eddie didn’t feel like laughing now. As he smiled at the stewardess - his best open, I’m-hiding-nothing smile, the one that had brought so many girls to their knees – as she said something meaningless and walked on, he suddenly felt very sure that he was going to puke. If there was one thing that would be worse than going through customs with drink on his breath and packs of the white stuff under his arms, it would be doing the same with vomit drying on his slacks.

 _Baked turkey_ , he thought, and got unsteadily to his feet, out into the aisle and up towards the door marked, thankfully, with a lit red sign saying VACANT. _Sure, Henry. And while we’re on the topic of poultry, how about cooked goose_?

The airplane bathroom was, like every airplane bathroom, cramped and ugly and reeked of piss. He felt his stomach lurch, and for a moment he was sure that he was going to empty his guts before he even closed the locking knob on the inside of the door. The sound of the motors was a steady, monotonous drone, like an insect waiting to bite. He looked at the mirror, wanting to see how bad he looked.

He looked, it turned out, like shit. Less like shit than he felt, at least. He looked at his pale, sweat-sheened face, the dark shadows under his hazel eyes, the mop of his dark curls, and he rested on the little metal sink, trying to steady his breathing. In that moment, a horrible feeling overtook him that he was being watched. It didn’t creep in at the edges, as one might expect; it was there all at once, and it was an absolute _certainty_ , a knowledge that someone was looking at him, at this bony, sweating idiot swaying in an airplane bathroom, in a hideous Hawaiian shirt that did only a _mostly_ effective job of disguising the duct-taped lumps under his arms, and that whoever was looking at him was waiting for something.

_Come on, quit it. Don’t get paranoid. You’re supposed to be the most unparanoid guy in the world, remember? That’s why they sent you. That’s why you’ve got to…_

It was probably a relief that, at that moment, a stronger urge than paranoia overtook him. He turned, and just about managed to get himself over the toilet before all thoughts of being watched were lost in a bitter tide of vomit.

**IV**

Susan waited. She was not a patient woman, and she felt less patient than ever with the pain and the fever running through her blood, but she waited anyway. A plan of sorts was beginning to form, an idea that maybe this door might be a salvation and not just an oddity to fill her last hours. She was itching to test that idea, but she felt sick enough already, without stepping through into the mind of a man who was still in the process of retching up the contents of his stomach.

When he left the privy, she stepped through the door again. Now that she knew what it was, she realised that she could feel him in there with her – a distant presence, like an itch at the back of her skull. His skull. Their skull. She looked down at herself, fascinated, and saw a young man whose shoes were clean but not new, whose wrist bore a gaudy and unpleasant kind of bracelet, and whose clothing was brighter and more garish than anything she had ever seen.

He had two hands. Ten fingers. She flexed the right hand experimentally, and although she could still feel the pain of her missing fingers, it felt more like habit than anything. The ghost of a ghost.

People were beginning to turn in their seats and look at her. At _him_. Susan could experiment with this new power later. For now, she probably ought to get back to his seat.

It took a couple of steps before she caught her balance fully. The carpet underfoot thrummed oddly, and the carriage pitched in small ways, but ways she had never experienced before. It worked better, she found, if she didn’t think about it. His body, slack and wracked by sickness as it was, knew what it was doing. She tried not to think about walking, and it was easy enough, because there was plenty else in the carriage to take up her attention.

There were both men and women in the seats. None were dressed in any way she recognised. The men – there were many more men than women - wore what might have been suits, but of a cloth and colours she had never seen before, and almost every one of them had a strange cravat tightened around their throats like a noose. The women wore pants, like the red-uniformed woman had, or skirts of a strange cut, with hems higher than Susan had ever seen – almost to their knees, she would have sworn. Not one single person carried a gun, or a sword, or even a knife. Most didn’t even glance up as she passed. There was a placidity in their eyes and in the slumped and steady way they held themselves, like cattle on their way to the butcher.

Some held papers and strange, shiny booklets, on which small symbols jumbled together in what might have been words, interspersed with pictures. Others scribbled with strange pens on paper. _Paper_. So much paper, the gunslinger had never seen, even in the library of Gilead that was. Even in the far-off days of her childhood, when the world had moved on less drastically and things were more as they were, her father had only one small notebook of paper, more precious than gold. He had used it, she remembered, for accounts and scrip, and he had filled every inch of the precious stuff, written small and close and then turned the page to write again, over the top of the first writing, rather than waste any space that might be uncovered. Now, as she watched, a balding man in a grey jacket ripped off a sheet of yellow paper from the pad he held, balling it up and throwing it away, although he had written only a few lines on it. The gunslinger, almost back to her seat, was stopped for a moment in her tracks by the sheer, profligate _waste_.

Had her world been like this once, she wondered – in those far-off days of the Old Ones, when the light of civilisation had still shone bright, before the world moved on? Had it been filled with these placid, peaceful folken, wasting and waiting? As she edged the Prisoner’s body back into the seat he had not so long stood up from, she thought of the station under the mountains, with its skeletons in their too-smart uniforms, and its shelves of books and papers gone to dust. She thought, on reflection, that it probably had.

There was a drink waiting for her. The glass felt strange to the touch – not cold enough or heavy enough to be glass at all, and with an odd flimsiness to it – but the gin was still gin. The other flavour, the sharp and fizzing stuff that stung the back of her throat and tasted of medicine, she didn’t recognise, but she drank it anyway, and after that long and crawling journey along the strand, even in another body, she had never felt the need for it more.

There was the woman again, the redhead in the army uniform, moving back up the aisle with an ease that seemed more remarkable to Susan, now she’d made the journey herself. She smiled that professional, red-lipped smile at the gunslinger. “Can I do anything else for you, sir?”

“I’d like summat to eat, please,” Susan said, through the man’s mouth.

“We’ll be serving a hot snack in…”

“I’m really starving, though,” the gunslinger interrupted, entirely honestly, and with only a small note of apology. “Anything you have, I’ll take. I ain’t picky.”

The army woman ( _girl, really_ , Susan thought, _she can’t be a day over twenty-five_ ) was looking at her strangely, the fine line of a frown creasing her lightly-powdered face. Susan, who had dealt with her share of men who demanded what wasn’t offered, met the woman’s suspicion with a smile. It felt strange to smile, and on this man’s face, she had no idea what it might look like. It seemed to do the trick, though; the young woman smiled back, if a little uncertainly, and Susan thought _thank fuck, he’s a good-looking one_.

“Well… I think I might have something. A sandwich, maybe. Tuna?”

Susan had no idea what a _tooter_ was or why the army woman was talking about witches, but she read no malice in the woman’s face, so she nodded nonetheless. “Whatever you have. Please.”

The woman hesitated. Under the powder, Susan noted the hint of colour, the way her eyes lingered. _Oh, he’s_ really _a good-looking one to’ee, ain’t he, sai?_ she thought, not without a hint of amusement. There was something else there, too, an unquashed suspicion. She couldn’t find it in herself to be surprised by that.

“You did look a little pale,” the red woman said at last, doubtfully. “I thought maybe it was air-sickness.”

“Just hunger.” The gunslinger considered whether she could push her luck. She thought, with a young man’s face, she probably could. “And thirst. I don’t suppose I could have another drink?”

For a horrible moment, she was certain she’d miscalculated, that this was more goodwill than a handsome young stranger could muster. She didn’t know what kind of world this was, or what kind of army the uniform signified, but she knew she was trapped in this sky-carriage for now, and the women who seemed to be in charge of it might do her vessel harm, if she gave them cause. He was doing something that he shouldn’t, after all; she didn’t know quite _what_ , but he hadn’t acted like an innocent man. Besides, she wanted something to eat.

Then the red woman smiled, a smooth and professional smile showing teeth whiter than Susan had imagined possible. “Of course. Same again?”

“Please.” More gin might be a bad idea for both of them, but she didn’t know what else to ask for. “And thankee. Truly.”

Again, that small frown, that doubt around the edges of the woman’s smile. Susan cursed herself for only now thinking how strange her Mejis accent might sound, coming from a man of this world. Whoever he was, he sure as fuck wasn’t a rancher hick. She wondered if she should have tried for the High Speech.

But what was done was done. As the army woman walked away, the gunslinger settled her stolen body back into the seat, reaching for the glass again. There was something she had to try.

**V**

She had instinctively grasped the glass with her right hand. She realised her mistake as soon as she stepped back through the door.

It didn’t break when it dropped out of her bandaged and fingerless hand, but it did spill. The strange, fizzing drink inside quickly sank into the damp sand and was lost. Susan, whose thirst and pain and hunger had all come back full-force the second she passed through the door, cursed out loud. She didn’t know what she had been drinking, hadn’t liked it all that much, but it had been a _drink_ , and now it was gone.

 _Enough whining_ , she scolded herself. _It came through. That’s what matters_.

And that meant enough. That meant _everything_.

In that moment, looking down at a fragment of another world on the grey grit of the beach, Susan realised that, after all, she was going to live.

**VI**

Eddie’s bad day was getting worse. Before, he’d at least had an explanation, a rational excuse to keep the panic from running around and around in his head like a hamster on a wheel. Sleep, stress, and cool turkey. A guy could dissociate for a couple minutes, nod off and wake up confused.

What a guy could _not_ do was close his eyes in an airline bathroom, and wake up comfortably in his seat, with almost a quarter of an hour having passed. The last thing he remembered was bowing down at the holy shrine of the shitter, puking his guts out, and here he was, settled in his seat without even the taste of vomit to show for it. And he still hadn’t had his goddamn drink.

 _You’re losing it_ , he thought, and fidgeted. It took all his self-control (and there was a lot of it, under the slack and wasted junkie’s itch) not to scratch at his arms. There were no track marks there, he’d been careful about that – the past few days, he’d shot up under his sack, where it hurt like hell but where, he hoped, nobody would check – but he wanted desperately to scratch, all the same. He wanted to be out of here. Most of all, he desperately, desperately wanted a hit.

This couldn’t be happening. He almost laughed at the stupidity of it. _Of all the days to pick up a case of narcolepsy…_

But it _wasn’t_ narcolepsy. He hadn’t blacked out. He couldn’t have blacked out, or he’d still be in the bathroom, head-down in the reeking toilet, probably with a line of businessmen crossing their legs and knocking down the door. At the very least, he’d be being fussed over by the staff, having them call a doctor, checking his pulse, and no doubt finding the heavy tumours of white powder strapped to his ribs.

 _Don’t worry about me!_ he imagined himself saying. _I brought my own medicine, doc!_

It wasn’t funny. Nothing about this situation was funny. His turkey might not be baked, but his goose was cooked – burned, even, like the time his mother had tried for Thanksgiving. Eddie Dean was, at the end of the day, royally screwed.

At least his drink was finally coming. He could see the red-haired stewardess he’d spoken to before, glass in hand. Any worries he might have had about drinking were gone; even if it made things worse, how much worse could it be? At least he could face it with a bit of Dutch courage.

To his surprise, the first thing she offered him was not the drink his mouth was by now positively watering for. Instead, she offered him… a sandwich.

 _I’m dreaming_ , he thought. _Only thing that makes sense. This is all a dream, and I’m going to wake up any minute, and I’ll probably still be in Nassau waiting for that British fuck to bring Balazar’s paydirt._

He flexed his right hand, grimacing – it ached oddly, as if it had been hit with a hammer, although he could see nothing wrong with it – and looked up with his best you-goofed-but-I’m-not-mad smile, opening his mouth to tell the stew that she must have gotten mixed up, but it was no biggie.

Eddie Dean had a moment where he felt, very distinctly, that he was not alone in his head. And then Eddie Dean was gone.

**VII**

Jane gave the guy in 3A his sandwich and his drink, and he smiled at her, and said something that she didn’t quite catch, something that didn’t entirely make sense. It had sounded like _thankee-sai,_ and just what the fuck, she wondered, was _that_ about?

All in all, 3A was starting to give her the willies.

 _More than starting. Might as well be honest. He’s freaking you out._ But there was nothing to go on, and she knew what her job was. She smiled, and told him he was very welcome, and was there anything else she could do for him? And then she bolted back to the galley, because she needed to think almost as much as she needed a smoke.

By the time she made it back out of sight of the passengers and dug out a cigarette, she’d started to calm down. It was nothing. Sometimes, passengers acted funny. He didn’t sound like she’d expected – a clean-cut guy in his twenties, in faded jeans and a paisley shirt, with not a hint of country about him, hadn’t been someone she _expected_ to sound like an extra in a Lee van Cleef movie – but that was on her, not on him. And yeah, he was a bit twitchy and acting strange, but he was probably scared of flying. Plenty of people were, after all. It was something you were taught to expect.

She had struck a match, and had it halfway to her cigarette, largely convinced that she was being a silly, flighty girl after all, when she realised what was wrong.

 _He sounded different._ It was a small thing, but it was _something_ , even so. _When you took the drink order. He sounded different. And his eyes…_

His eyes had been hazel. Almost green, with flecks of gold. She remembered, because they had been so striking, and because they tilted him over from just okay into kinda cute. But she’d just taken him a sandwich and a drink, and he’d said that odd _thankee-sai_ and nodded to her, and _his eyes had been grey_. Grey and cold as a winter ocean, and with a hardness and sharpness she’d never seen before.

The match burned down to her fingers, snapping her out of her reverie with a yelp.

“Jane?” Paula looked at her with concern. “You alright?”

“Fine. Daydreaming.”

 _His eyes were always grey_ , she tried to tell herself. Or they were always hazel, that was a possibility, too, and she’d invented the whole thing in her mind because she was on edge. What else could it be?

Jane lit another match, and this time she completed the operation. She took a long, soothing drag of smoke, and it occurred to her that there was a third option. Contact lenses, of course. Those fancy ones that changed your eye colour. He’d gone into the bathroom not so long ago – for a long time, too, long enough that she’d started to worry he might have passed out – and then he’d come back out with different coloured eyes and a faint smell of vomit. So, contact lenses. Come on the plane with them in, feel like crap, take them out to be more comfortable. It was simple enough. Neat, even.

 _Coloured_ contact lenses.

Jane Dorning personally knew maybe two dozen people who wore contacts. It was never discussed, but she knew why, as well; passengers didn’t like to see airline staff wearing glasses. It made them nervous.

Of those two dozen, she could think of no more than four who wore _coloured_ contacts. All of them were women. All of them were very pretty, very vain, and very well-off. 3A didn’t look as though he was any of those things.

 _You may feel something_. The voice was that of her old instructor at flight school, a tough old battle-axe who looked like she might have been a stewardess for the Wright Brothers. _Some little tickle. Something just a little bit wrong. In almost every hijacking, you’ll find one or two people on staff – usually flight attendants, which you ladies will be in just a few weeks – who felt that suspicion, that_ certainty _that something was off, and said nothing. Did they get fired for that? Christ, no! You can’t put a guy in shackles for the way he scratches his pimples._ And she had stopped, and she had raised a finger, and she had said, _But if there’s one thing you remember about dealing with potential or actual terrorists, remember this. If you feel that little tickle, don’t do anything… but that includes forgetting. Because there’s always that one little chance that you might be able to stop something before it starts… something like an unscheduled twelve-day layover in some shithole Arab country_.

Just a tickle. Just a suspicion.

She would watch, Jane decided, as she finished her cigarette. She would not forget.

**VIII**

Susan had not known what to expect from the tooter sand-witch, and what she was given was a pleasant surprise. It looked to her like an uncooked popkin, filled with some strange greyish meat, sliced into halves. At the end of the day, though, only one thing about it mattered.

It was _food_.

Sitting there, she could feel her mouth – _his_ mouth – begin to water. How long since she had eaten something more substantial than jerky? Since the rabbit, she supposed. Since the long palaver on the mountainside, where the man in black had given her meat. Days, maybe weeks. Maybe years.

This time, she was careful to hold both halves of the popkin in his left hand, looking around the sky-carriage. Nobody seemed to be attending to the man whose body she inhabited (though, unbeknownst to her, Jane Dorning was _thinking_ about him very hard indeed). Susan turned, holding the sand-witch, and stepped back through the door.

Her first bite was tentative. Strange, soft bread dented and gave under her teeth, oddly sticky; underneath, the fish (at least, she assumed by the smell it was fish) was flaky and rich. Butter, in quantities she had rarely had it, ran smooth against her tongue. It was all she could do not to wolf down the whole thing in a mouthful.

Susan Deschain had discovered another important thing about the tooter sand-witch. It was _delicious_.

She could feel the strength coming back into her body, little by little. It wasn’t enough – would not be enough, she thought, until and unless she could find medicine – but it was something. It took her from feeling like a dead woman crawling to one who merely _might_ die. With that, there came some clarity. As she polished off the last of the second sand-witch half, she settled back where she sat, regarding the door.

Death was receding. Not fast enough, and not far enough, but it was drawing back. With it went some of her desperation, some of that animal instinct that drove her to claw for every minute no matter the cost. In its absence came guilt.

The man whose body she had been in – a man whose name she still did not know – had not been real to her until that moment. She had been studiously avoiding his reality. It was one she didn’t want to face, but the curse of sanity was that one could only deny reality for so long.

When she was a girl, Susan Delgado had had someone else inside her head. Decades later, she remembered all too well how it had felt to awake by the riverside, clutching a sharp stone that had cut into her palm, slashing at her hair, not knowing how she had gotten there or why. It had been a petty trick by a petty witch, but it had stayed with her nonetheless, that strange absence in her life, a few minutes out of all of those years, when her mind had not been her own.

She didn’t believe in _ka_ or in fate, not really. One thing she couldn’t help but believe in, though, was irony.

She sat cross-legged on the coarse grey grit, looking down at the ugly, shrouded shape of her bandaged hand. It was different, she told herself. She was dying. She had no choice, and she would take what she had to. She wondered whether that was how the witch had thought of it, too.

“Fuck.” She whistled low through her teeth, grimacing. The thought struck her, with a curious compulsion, that she could still step away. She could slam the door shut, and with her newfound strength, make it perhaps another mile down the beach. Perhaps two. She could die in her own body, and take no more liberties with someone else’s. For once in her long life of mistakes and stubborn stupidity, she could just walk away.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she said again, and pulled herself to her feet, and stepped once more through the door.

**IX**

Eddie would not have believed, if you had asked him five minutes earlier, that he could fall asleep. Everything was just too damn strange. And yet, even with the anxiety of another blanked few moments, he felt… sleepy. It was a strange heaviness, weighing him down, as though he’d been walking for days and only now had a chance to sit down.

It helped that, at least, he was reassured about something. He might not _remember_ it, but he’d clearly said what he meant to say to the stewardess. There was his drink, on the armrest; and she had gone; and she seemed to have taken the inexplicable sandwich away with her.

 _It’s the junk, little brother,_ Henry’s voice reassured him. _That’s all. Cool turkey takes a guy all sorts of ways._

He believed that. He _wanted_ to believe that. It was inconvenient, and dangerous, and more than a little bit frightening given the circumstances – but if it was just his memory, maybe that wasn’t so bad.

 _Hell_ , he thought, and almost laughed, _could be a bonus. This is one vacation I don’t much want to remember_.

He sipped his drink, soothed just enough that he no longer felt the need to gulp down as much gin as needed to take the edge off. Letting his head fall back against the headrest, he closed his eyes.

It was 4:21. He had three hours before the plane would land. Three hours before the real test began. Maybe, he thought, it wouldn’t hurt to at least try to get some rest. No matter what he told himself, there was no good in blacking out like this when the stakes were so high. Maybe sleep would help.

He slept, and dreamed. In the back of his mind, no longer controlling him but now settling back as a silent passenger, the gunslinger watched.

**X**

It was strange, being in the mind of a sleeping man. The gunslinger had intended, when she stepped back into the Prisoner, to try and make contact, to see whether she could let him know she was there. Instead, she found herself hunkering there, watching another man’s dreams play out in front of her like mummers on a stage.

He dreamed of his brother. Henry’s face drifted in front of him, smiling. _Don’t worry_ , he was saying, _you’ll be all right, little brother. You fly down there to Nassau, there’ll be a man come by Friday night. One of the good guys. He’ll fix you, leave enough stuff to take you through the weekend. Sunday night he brings the coke and you give him the key to the safe deposit box, just like Balazar said. Monday noon you’ll fly out, and with a face as honest as yours, you’ll breeze through Customs and we’ll be eating steak in Sparks before the sun goes down._

Easy for Henry to say. Henry was home safe. Henry wasn’t the one dancing the smuggler’s blues, with his turkey cool and his goose cooked. (The gunslinger, watching this, wondered at the phrasing, almost laughed at the whimsy of it. Almost.)

Things had gone wrong right away. The _good guy_ who had come by had been an ugly, sallow thing with a British accent, teeth that leaned like yellow gravestones in a swamp, and a pencil moustache like he thought he was in an old film noir. He had smiled, and asked for the key.

“That’s not the way it goes. You give me something to take me through the weekend. Sunday night you’re supposed to give me something. I give you the key, Monday morning you go into town and use it to get something else. I don’t know what, ‘cause that’s not my business.”

Suddenly, there was a flat blue automatic in the sallow thing’s hand. “Why don’t you just give it to me now, _senor_?” It came out flat and nasal: _senior_. “I will save time and effort, you will save your life.”

The gun barrel was a dark and empty eye. Eddie Dean looked into it, and then up at the sallow man, and he found a smile pulling at his lips, a sharp and ugly smile that was hardly his own. “Why don’t you just put that thing away, you little scuzz? Or do you maybe want Balazar to send someone down here and cut your eyes out of your head with a rusty knife?”

It was astonishing, the magic of Balazar’s name. The gun was gone like magic; in its place, an envelope. Eddie took it, and the sallow thing turned towards the door.

“I think you better wait,” Eddie said, with a calmness he didn’t feel.

“You think I won’t go if I want to go?”

“I think, if you go and this is bad shit, I’ll be gone tomorrow. Then you’ll be in deep shit.”

The sallow thing turned back, sulky and reluctant, and sat. Eddie emptied the envelope onto the glass tabletop. The powder inside was brown, and it looked evil. Holding the sallow man’s eyes the entire time, he separated out a small fraction of the pile, fingered it, rubbed it on the roof of his mouth. Then he turned his head and spat it into the wastebasket.

“You wanna die, is that it? You got a death wish?”

“It’s all there is.” The sallow thing looked sulky. The sallow thing looked _murderous_. Eddie had an inkling that the sallow thing was considering whether a bullet in this junkie’s brain might not be worth Balazar’s wrath.

Luckily, in the moment, Eddie found he didn’t much care. He didn’t believe that the sallow thing’s calculations would come off that way. He knew one thing; if he folded now, he was sunk.

“I have a reservation out tomorrow morning.” A lie, but he was pretty sure – _almost_ sure enough – that the sallow thing wouldn’t have the resources to check. “TWA. Did it on my own, just in case the contact turned out to be a fuck-up like you. I don’t mind. It’ll be a relief, to tell you the truth. I’m not cut out for this line of work.”

That evening, when the play came through – when the sallow thing scraped and sneered its way out of his hotel room, returning five hours later with what it swore blind was China White; when Eddie tested the dull ivory-coloured powder against his teeth and found it good enough for now; when the thin-moustached man left at last and he could fix properly – he felt like that was a lie. On the euphoria of heroin clawing at the nerves at the base of his spine, and on the knowledge that he’d won this round, he felt he might be cut out for this line of work after all. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant thought, because he didn’t want to do this ever again. But still, it felt good.

He no longer thought that.

The sleeping man on the airplane, the man in whose mind the gunslinger rode and on whose back a mean and inescapable monkey clung, was not cut out for this. He knew it in his heart, and he knew it in his dreams, which turned now to the future. To Customs. To a cold, dark jail cell, and turkey that might as well be frozen. And, once again, to Henry.

The gunslinger looked away. She had seen enough. More than enough, if she was honest; she had come back through hoping to find a way to make things right, and instead, had probed further even than she had planned. _The sleeping mind_ , she remembered, dimly, _has no defences_. Something she knew all too well.

Still, she knew more than she had known before. She knew what he was doing here. He was carrying something for someone, and he must pass this ritual, this custom, before it would be over. And he _must_ pass it, for her sake, she thought. The powder he carried might be medicine of a sort, but it would not be the kind that saved her. If she was to live, if she was to justify this invasion of him, she must get out of this sky-carriage and find her own salvation. Somewhere in his strange and wonderous world of paper and tooter and women in pants, there must surely be something that could fight the fever-heat in her blood. But it would not be in the jail cell he feared.

The Prisoner had steel. She saw that in his memories of the hotel; in the way he had stared down the black eye of the gun’s barrel. He had steel, but he was also made stupid by desperation, and he had given in to despair. And the drug he had taken (not the same drug as the one he carried, she surmised; he thought of _coke_ and _china white_ so differently, and he only wanted one of them with that desperate need) had him by the balls just as surely as the devil-weed would, and that was the greatest weakness of all.

Alone, she was sure, he would fail. He would rot in jail at the behest of the keepers of the custom, and she – she would die alone on the beach, a million miles from anywhere that could be called home, and wait for the gulls and the lobster-things to claim what was left of her.

Susan settled back into the shadows of the Prisoner’s thoughts, and closed her eyes, and tried to think.

**XI**

Eddie was awoken by an announcement from the co-pilot, eager to inform all passengers that in approximately forty-five minutes, they would be touching down at Kennedy International. Air temp seventy degrees, wind ten miles per hour, thank you one and all, ladies and gents, for choosing to fly with Delta Airlines. And by the way, Customs staff have their sniffer dogs at the ready, so please get your ass ready for a prodding, Mr Dean.

The co-pilot didn’t actually say that last part, of course, but he didn’t have to. Eddie heard it anyway.

 _You’re still spooked_ , he told himself, and tried to breathe. _You slept too long, and you’re out of it, and you’re spooked. But there’s nothing to get the TSA on your ass like going in spooked._

All around him, people were starting the dance of the journey’s end, checking their duty declaration cards and proof of citizenship. Eddie looked out of the window, at the city far below, but getting closer. He could feel the sweat prickling under his arms, sticky under the duct tape and the plastic baggies.

Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes to pull himself together. Forty-five minutes to make sure everything was just right.

Of course, everything was not all right. Everything was very wrong. He’d just woken up, and already he could feel the jitters crawling up and down his arms.

 _It’ll be a breeze,_ he told himself, in Henry’s voice. _A breeze. People do this shit all the time. You dealt with the skeeze back in Nassau, and you’ll deal with this. Balazar wouldn’t have sent you if you couldn’t handle it. You’ve got everything you need. You’ve got everything to get you through this and out the other side._

_A cool fucking breeze._

**XII**

Jane was watching the man in 3A. The man with the two-tone eyes and the funny, not-quite-right words. She went by his seat again, not wanting to admit that she was looking for an excuse. His eyes were hazel.

 _Christ, you’re being a goose_! she told herself, for the millionth time. _So he put the contacts back in. He took his nap, and then he put his contacts back in. Nothing weird about that._

Nothing – except that he had no reason for the colour contacts. Except that he had eaten that sandwich impossibly fast, and drunk only a couple sips of his second drink. Except for the funny accent; the change in how he moved, as if he was trying on different versions of himself; the way he was too pale and kept jittering. Nothing, except a tickle at the back of her mind.

“Jane? You okay?” Suzy Douglas came up beside her.

Jane almost said yes. Yes, she was fine. Of course.

_There’s always that one little chance._

“You’re gonna think I’m crazy.” She was chewing on her lip. It would destroy her lipstick, and she might get grief for that later, but she didn’t stop.

“Already do.” Suzy was cheery only a moment. Whatever was in Jane’s expression, it was clearly enough to tell her that this wasn’t a joke. Sighing, she moved a little closer to Jane’s side, lowering her voice. “What is it?”

“3A.” He was in her sights, through the curtain. Jane pressed her lips together, and swallowed. “Something’s wrong with him.”

“What, you mean like…” Suzy looked worried. “We’re only forty minutes out. Should I see if there’s a doctor?”

“No.” Jane didn’t look at Suzy. She didn’t dare. Forty minutes. It felt like a long-ass time. A lot could happen in forty minutes. “No, it’s…”

 _It’s_ what _, exactly? Sleep-talk? Contact lenses? The jitters?_ But it was real. She knew it was real. It had to be real, because otherwise she’d been standing here for ten minutes, quietly calculating what she could use as a weapon, for absolutely no reason. And if _that_ was the case, maybe airline attending wasn’t for her after all. Maybe her calling was somewhere a bit friendlier, like a padded cell.

3A leaned over, pulling his bag out from the seat in front, and Jane felt a violent surge of adrenaline, like the moment before a rollercoaster goes over the edge – only without a rail to run on. She saw, actually _saw_ , him pull a snub-nosed Uzi out of the zip-top bag; grabbed for the heavy fire extinguisher she’d determined was her best option; felt her muscles tense, already starting to close the distance.

It wasn’t an Uzi. It was a boarding pass. A boarding pass and a duty declaration card, and one of those clear plastic wallets men used to carry their passports.

Jane almost collapsed. The certainty rushed out of her, and all that was left was hot, ugly embarrassment. “You can say it,” she muttered to Suzy. “I’m an asshole.”

“No.” Suzy turned to look at her. “You did the right thing.”

“I over-reacted. And dinner’s on me.”

“Like hell it is. And don’t look at him. Look at me. _Smile_ , Janey.”

Baffled, Jane did as she was told. She could feel the raw spot on her lip where she’d worn away the lipstick and worried at the skin. One of her hands still rested on the cold metal of the fire extinguisher. “I don’t…”

“You were watching his hands.” Suzy laughed, as if Jane had told a joke. After a moment, Jane joined in. “I was watching his shirt. You see what happened to it when he bent over like that? He’s carrying enough shit under there to stock a Woolworth’s notions counter – only I don’t think it’s the kind of stuff you buy at Woolworth’s.”

Jane laughed again, for real this time. She felt giddy, and stupid, and incredibly relieved. Suzy had five years’ seniority on her, and Jane, who just a moment ago had felt she had the situation under some desperate kind of control, was now just all too glad the adults had arrived. “What do we do?”

“ _We_ don’t do anything. Tell the Captain, before we make descent. Captain speaks to Customs. Our friend gets in line like everyone else, except then he gets pulled _out_ of line by some men who’ll escort him to a little room. It’ll be the first in a very long succession of little rooms for him, I’m guessing.”

“Jesus.” Jane was shaking, she realised. She was also smiling, but she guessed it didn’t look at all like her usual professional, can-I-help-you hostess smile. Hot and cold chills shuddered through her.

In an odd sort of way, she was disappointed. Not a terrorist. Just a smuggler.

And it was sort of a shame. He was cute. Not a lot, but a little.

**XIII**

When the man had strapped the bags to him – strapped them with so much skill and so much tape that it felt almost like a surgical procedure – and handed Eddie the paisley shirt, carefully tailored to hide any unsightly bulges, he had told Eddie to make one or two last checks before landing. That was part of why Eddie Dean now stood, bleary-eyed and still a little unsteady, and headed towards the bathroom again, keen to get himself sorted out before the FASTEN SEATBELT sign came on. It was not, however, the main reason.

He had, through a fantastic effort of will, kept back a little of the stuff that the sallow thing had had the temerity to call China White. Maybe it would make things better, maybe it would make them worse. But the paranoia was eating at him, and it would at least take the edge off.

He retrieved the little twist of paper and powder from where he’d hidden it in his sock, and was just opening it when he heard a voice – heard it clear as day.

 _Listen to me_.

Fingers tightening on the paper, hazel eyes wide as a deer’s, Eddie Dean whipped his head around. The bathroom was empty. He knew it was empty.

Paranoid. He was getting so fucking paranoid. Once again, he lifted his hand to his mouth.

_For fuck’s sake, boy, listen!_

This time, the voice was like a slap across the face. It was a woman’s voice, and for a moment, panicking, he thought it must be one of the stewardesses. But it didn’t _sound_ like a stew, and there was nobody _there_. The voice wasn’t muffled enough to have come from outside the locked bathroom door. It was clear, completely clear, as if the woman was speaking directly into his ear.

“You’re not real,” he said, out loud.

_I’m talking to ‘ee, ain’t I?_

“No.” He shook his head, pursing his lips. “I’m going crazy.”

 _Aye, mayhap, but that’s a different matter._ There was a dry humour in her voice. It was a _weird_ voice, too, partway country and western, partway old-world historical drama. _Do’ee want to clear this custom of theirs, or no?_

Eddie opened his mouth to ask just what the fuck she was talking about. Then he closed it. “I’m not listening to you,” he told her – told _it_ , told his own mind. “You’re bugs crawling up the wall.”

The voice was quiet for a moment, as if confused. He dared to think it was gone, moved for the powder again.

 _Don’t’ee fucking touch that shit!_ Sharp as a guncrack, and with a hard irritation that made him think horribly of his mother. Eddie found himself almost dropping the paper, found himself with a desperate urge to hide his hands behind his back and say he never. _She sees you, boy._

“She?” He blinked at the mirror. Again, that strange sense of _watching_. He could have sworn, for a moment, he saw something reflected in his own eye that was impossible: the wheeling shape of a seabird.

_The army woman. The redhead. Shut your mouth and listen._

Not seeing any other option, Eddie did.

**XIV**

_Bugs crawling up the walls_ , he said. Susan had no idea what that meant, only that she didn’t like the image. But she understood enough. She understood that he didn’t believe in her.

Fair enough. She probably wouldn’t believe in her, either. It didn’t matter whether he thought she was his conscience, the devil on his shoulder, or just a drug-induced figment of what, in her mind, she thought of as the devil-powder. What mattered was that he had, for the moment, decided to listen to her. If she chose her words carefully, if she reached him, they might just get through this.

 _What fucking army woman?_ He thought it, and she heard it, clear as day. His mind was so close, mingling with hers. She could reach out, pull his thoughts from it. She did so now.

 _The stewardess._ A strange word. _His_ word. It was a queer experience, finding it, like dragging out a forgotten memory – but one that wasn’t her own. _The one who brought your drink. She sees what you’re about. She thought it was summat else, but now – now I think she sees true._

The two women, laughing. Women didn’t laugh like that when they were happy. They had looked away a little too quickly, after staring a little too long, and Susan had not missed the stewardess’ hand on the strange metal thing. She had a nasty feeling that was her fault, not Eddie’s. Somewhere along the way, in all her careless rush for survival, she’d done or said something to make the red-haired army woman suspicious. And now…

 _They know. They’ve seen what you’re carrying, the… the_ coke _. I don’t believe they’ll move until the time comes. Figure we’ve got till this custom of yours to get rid of it._

 _Get rid of it??_ Eddie didn’t open his mouth this time, but he didn’t have to say it out loud for Susan to hear the shrill note of hysteria in it. He laughed, sharp and unpleasant. _Sure. I’ll just flush two pounds of cocaine down the shitter. While I’m at it, how about I flush myself, too? Can’t get me in any deeper shit._

 _I have a plan._ It was an effort not to snap at him. She had never had all too much patience for people with more wit than sense, people who met every serious occasion with a pithy quip and no useful thoughts. Cuthbert had been like that, sometimes, and it had driven her to distraction then, too. _I did some tests, while you were sleeping. I have somewhere you can hide the cocaine. Long enough to clear this custom, and to get back to your Balazar. Will’ee trust me?_

“Lady,” Eddie said out loud, into the mirror, “I don’t even believe in you.”

She had no patience for people with more wit than sense, but even so, she laughed.

**XV**

In a bizarre way, it was the laughter that made him believe it. He didn’t _want_ to believe it. He wanted to believe he was having some kind of breakdown, that this really was unchecked paranoia and the itch of withdrawal at work. He wanted to snort his heroin in peace, go back to his seat, and convince himself that he was going to be fine.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to be fine. Even if the voice in his head _was_ a hallucination (and it had to be, it really had to be – but it was a damn good one), she was also right. As soon as she’d said it, he knew she was right. He hadn’t seen it, hadn’t been looking for it – but looking back, thinking about it, the stew had definitely been staring. And all the tailoring in the world couldn’t keep off the possibility of visible lumps from a pound of powder under each arm.

He looked in the mirror, and with the hand not holding the twist of paper, raked back the dark mop of his hair. He was too pale, waxy and sweat-sheened. He was itching for a fix, and he was being watched like a hawk by some stewardess, and there was nowhere he could dump the stuff now even if he tried, and if they pulled him aside, he was done.

If he was still carrying it.

 _Okay_. His lips didn’t move. It seemed stupid to use his mouth to speak, when his mind seemed to be doing the job just fine. Besides, part of him felt better that way – as if it made a difference that, if he _was_ going crazy, nobody else could hear him talking to the voices in his head. As if his crazy could stay a secret, and somehow be less dangerous for it. _Okay. Let’s say I trust you. What then?_

 _I don’t know._ There was a dryness in the voice of his madness. _I just know I can’t do it for ‘ee. I can take myself through, but not you._ She was quiet for a moment. Eddie gritted his teeth, fingers fidgeting on the twist of paper. If he just took it, she might go away. All this might go away.

He didn’t take it. He waited.

At last, she spoke again. _Turn around. Look for the door. With me._

He felt something shift, like a hand grabbing his soul by the shoulder, like a second mind within his own. He saw through two pairs of eyes, heard through two pairs of ears, thought with two brains, his blood pumping through two hearts, his breath catching in two sets of lungs. Pain, unexpected and violent, burst hot and sudden in a hand that wasn’t his, a leg that wasn’t his either. Eddie Dean turned around.

There was a hole in the side of the bathroom. It hovered there, impossible and stubborn, with sharp, clear edges that seemed to have been cut into the metal walls. Through it, he saw not the freezing air of the altitude he _knew_ they must be at, but the dirty grey sand and white surf of a beach. He heard the waves, smelt the salt sharp and harsh in the air. He stared.

 _Go through_ , the voice insisted. _We ain’t got all that much time_.

It was impossible. It was entirely, utterly impossible. He was going crazy – or, more likely, well past _going_ and into _gone_. Cold gooseflesh crept up and down Eddie’s arms. This wasn’t happening. None of this was happening.

He took one last, rueful look at the paper and powder in his hand, then sighed and stepped through the hole in the world.

**XVI**

He didn’t know what he had expected from the woman in his head. When she rose up beside him, though, his first thought was _that’s not a woman, that’s a corpse. A corpse that doesn’t know it yet._

She was tall – an inch or two taller than Eddie himself, and he was hardly a shrimp – and painfully thin. Not thin like a model or a socialite, but thin like a scarecrow, blistered skin rough and brown as leather pulled taut over the xylophone of her bones. Under the tan and sunburn, she was pale, lending her some of the same greyness as the beach she stood on. Her hair, dirty white and braided messily down her back, was down to her hips. She swayed where she stood, and he saw the fever-spots on her high cheekbones, the inflamed red that ran up her arm from the ugly, bloodstained wad of rags that had taken the place of her hand. Sweat sheened the craggy, sharp-edged planes of her face.

But her eyes were sharp as steel. They were the same colour as the sea, as the overcast sky in this strange other world, and they burned with a furious vitality that almost frightened him. He had never seen anyone, woman or man, who looked quite so much like they would turn their back on death and simply refuse it. He had a sense, in that moment, that she’d done precisely that.

She was in a state of undress. Like her thinness, there was nothing alluring about it, nothing that invited or suggested vulnerability. Her worn leather vest, which looked like something out of a Western, hung loose over her bare shoulders and belly. Her breasts were bound down with a rag that might once have been white - or almost any colour, it was impossible to tell through the yellow and grey and brown of what he thought might be largely, but certainly not entirely, sweat-stains. She was old, but her body had none of the slackness of an old woman’s; what was left of her seemed to have been whittled away to razor-sharpness, and he had a sense that of the little meat still on her bones, all of it was muscle.

She wore men’s jeans, too big for her and tightened at the waist, all their colour lost to hard wear and weather. And over the jeans, slung low on her hips, she carried two of the biggest pistols Eddie had ever seen. The gunbelts that carried them were largely empty, with only a dozen or so bullets in the loops that ran along them, but that didn’t make the guns themselves any less intimidating.

They might have been .45s – but impossibly old ones, with polished wood grips that seemed almost to glow with their own light, the warmest and most colourful thing about her. They should, like her jeans, have looked too big for her. They did not. They looked as though they were made for her.

Eddie realised he was staring. He wet his lips, trying to find something to say. Anything.

“Don’t stare,” she told him. Coming from an actual throat, her voice sounded different. It cracked and strained with effort, and there was a shudder underneath it, like fever-chills running through the air.

“Your arm…” It came out without him entirely intending it to. He couldn’t look away from her, couldn’t take his eyes off her guns and her strange clothes and her bare and blistered flesh – but most of all, couldn’t take his eyes off the bundle of filthy grey-black rags running halfway up her arm, and the infection that crawled red and angry up from it.

“Never mind my fucking arm.” She almost lost her voice in the middle of saying it. _She’s dead,_ he thought again, with a kind of wonder. _She’s dead, and what’s going to happen when she realises it?_ “We ain’t got time. Take your shirt off.”

“Buy me dinner first.” The quip rose straight to his tongue without bothering to detour through his brain. From the hard, flat look she gave him, she didn’t find it funny. Eddie grimaced. “Tough crowd,” he muttered, as he started to unbutton his shirt. He could see what she was driving at – he couldn’t exactly shed the stuff without getting rid of the shirt first, after all - but it still felt uncomfortable, undressing with those gimlet eyes on him. He thought that if the old hag was looking at him with lust, it might actually have been easier. He’d never been the subject of such intense, focused _disinterest_.

He gulped, and looked over his shoulder. It felt better than looking at her, in the moment. Behind him was a strange sight. There was the door he had come through, still open, with a wide arc in the gritty, grey-brown sand to show where it had swung. And beyond it, there was the airplane bathroom. He could see himself in the mirror, wide-eyed and pale, the duct tape wrapped around his bony chest making him look like a guy limping his way out of treatment for broken ribs. In front of him, the bathroom. Behind him, almost comically surreal in the airline mirror, an endless stretch of shingle, sand, and sea.

“ _Move_ ,” the woman snapped at him, and Eddie jerked as if slapped, shrugging off his faded paisley shirt and fumbling for an end to the duct tape that seemed to have become one solid lump on his chest. She was right to hurry him, he realised. They didn’t have much time. How long before the staff came to check on him, especially now they were on guard? How long before they decided that he’d taken a hot shot in there, or passed out, even if they wouldn’t come to arrest him before landing? How long before someone came slamming down the shithouse door?

And what the hell would they _see_ , if they did?

It had taken the man in Nassau over twenty minutes to strap the bags to Eddie’s ribs. Eddie figured they had maybe fifteen now, and it was shrinking with every moment that he _couldn’t find the fucking end of the motherfucking tape_.

**XVII**

Susan watched him impatiently for a good minute or two. The strange glue-string that held the bags in place was foreign to her, but she could see the problem easily enough. Even if it had been rope or cloth that was wound so thoroughly around him, they might have been a few minutes about unstrapping him. As it was, the more he scratched with shaking hands at the thin silver-grey stuff, the more obvious it became that this was worse than any knot she had envisioned.

The solution, though, was the same. She realised it all at once, and turned away. Her purse was a few feet away, lying on the gritty, salt-soaked sand where she had dropped it. Inside it was the solution.

When a knot couldn’t be untied, what did you do?

**XVIII**

Eddie looked up from his frantic scrabbling with the tape, and saw a swaying, skeletal crone staggering towards him with a knife in her hand and cold murder in her eyes. All of that considered, he thought he was pretty justified in his reaction, even if that reaction was screaming like a little girl and falling flat on his ass.

She looked down at him with disgust, and staggered the rest of the distance between them, holding the weapon out to him hilt-first. The knife’s leather-wound grip was worn to a hard sheen, the handle beneath it contoured to what he presumed was years of her grip. The blade, when he drew it from its weathered scabbard, was barely a sliver compared to the heft of the grip; it had been sharpened and sharpened over what seemed to have been centuries, and the only impression it gave more than that of deadliness was that of _age_. Years had been folded into that blade, years more worked into the silver he could see under the leather wrappings. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything that looked at once so alien, so deadly, and so ancient.

Except, of course, for the woman who carried it.

“Take the fucking thing and cut yourself free, cully.” Her voice made every word sound like a withering insult. As soon as Eddie had taken the knife from her, she took a half-step back and sank down onto the sand, her face hard and taut with strain. “I’m tired enough carrying myself on my own two feet. Don’t make me carry you, too.”

He opened his mouth to say something sarcastic, and then he closed it again. Partly, it was because she looked like she would be more than capable of slapping him into next week, no matter how sick she was, if he pushed his luck too far. Mostly, it was because for a split second, he heard in her voice just how tired she really was.

 _Maybe_ , he thought, as he looked down at his tape-covered chest and began to gingerly saw at the strappings, _she_ does _know she’s a corpse, after all. Maybe she just doesn’t know how to lie down yet_.

“What do you want?” It occurred to him only while saying it that he should have asked this much, much earlier in the conversation. Before she guided him through into a beach on another world and gave him a knife, maybe.

The woman grunted. “Not to talk,” she told him, flatly. “It _hurts_.”

He believed that, too. The pain of talking might not be on her face, but it was in the scratchy, rasping edge to her voice, in the way her clearly-visible ribs rose and fell harshly after each sentence forced its way out. Corpses weren’t made for talking, he guessed.

Eddie Dean, on the other hand, wasn’t made for shutting up. He talked when he was nervous, always had done – and _nervous_ didn’t even begin to cover what he felt right now.

“It’s just, I can’t help if I don’t know what you’re after. I mean, I get it, you’re trying to help me out here, I get that, and I’m grateful as hell if it works, but… I mean, if it works, if this gets me through Customs clear and easy and everything goes well with Balazar, what then?” The tape was starting to separate, strand by strand. He could feel the weight of it pulling on his chest hair as it loosened. _God, when I pull this off, it’s gonna take my fucking nipples with it_. He almost said _that_ out loud, too, and was glad he had at least enough self-control to bite that back.

Not that the woman looked like she would have minded, or even noticed. She had finally taken her eyes off him and was staring past him, through the hole in the air and into the airplane bathroom beyond. Her unbandaged hand moved restlessly on her thigh, fingers drumming an irregular, high-speed rhythm on the threadbare denim of her jeans. Eddie was just resigning himself to the fact that this was going to be an entirely one-sided conversation, and that if he was going to find out anything it was still a long way down the line, when she answered.

“Life,” she said, blunt and with a curious lack of intensity, as if she were commenting on the weather. “It ain’t much, but I’m in the habit of it. Reckon your man Balazar has other medicines?”

 _Medicines_? He thought it, and thankfully, he _only_ thought it. _Lady, if Enrico Balazar looks like a doctor to you, you’re in for a wild ride_. But he had a creeping certainty that, if she didn’t think him clearing customs would save her ass, she would drop him right back in the deep shit where she’d found him. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be the first, either – though with the state of her, he might be the last. So aloud, he only said, “If he’s not got what you need, he can get it. Guy’s the medicine man to half of New York City.”

She grunted again, and fell silent except for the hoarse rasping of her breath.

Eddie managed to let the silence stand for almost a full thirty seconds - silence broken by the harsh whisper of the knife against the tape, his own blood in his ears, and the ragged, snoring breaths of the dying woman. It was too much for him, though. That kind of silence was always too much. When it was broken by a seagull crying a few feet overhead, he was so keyed-up that he jumped, yelping as his hand jerked against his chest.

The knife was sharp, all right. Sharp enough that the blood welled immediately to the place where he had caught himself on the blade. It rose into a thick, hypnotising ruby on his sternum, and seemed to hold itself there for a horribly long time before beginning to ooze down his belly.

“ _Jesus_ …” he hissed, and felt his guts clench, his head spinning. He was sure any remaining colour had drained out of his face. This was too much. God, this was _too fucking much_. Nobody could stand this.

“It can’t be helped.” There was no sympathy in the old bitch’s voice. “If blood makes ’ee sick, swallow it down. We’re almost out of time.”

She was right. Through the door, in the other world, Eddie could hear what he’d blocked out before: the knocking. Someone was knocking on the bathroom door. He checked his watch, and was oddly unsurprised to find that it had lost time completely. How long had he been here, out on the beach? How long until they landed? Was the FASTEN SEATBELTS sign already up and blaring red?

He wasn’t afraid that they would be suspicious at his absence. The woman had been right; they already were suspicious. He was getting pulled aside at the gate no matter what he did – that ship had long sailed. What he was afraid of was more immediate. What he was afraid of was that when one door opens, another one closes.

This was a hell of a bad trip. The worst he’d ever had. But had a feeling that waking up out of it, without a hope or a prayer, just with coke strapped to his ribs and an airline staff that knew it… that would be worse.

**XIX**

He cut himself once more, a shallow but bloody pinprick just above the first, before admitting it. “I can’t cut higher than that.” It felt heavy and sick in his mouth, a hideous failure. Like the moment where you realise the light’s not the end of the tunnel, but an oncoming train. “I can’t see what I’m doing. My chin’s in the way.” And it was so stupid, wasn’t it? Such a stupid reason to reach the end of your tether. _My chin’s in the way_.

Suddenly, even more than he wanted to throw up or pass out, he wanted to cry.

_Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. What’s a stupider prize than slitting your own throat on a beach that doesn’t exist?_

_And if I do that, if I kill myself in another world,_ what the hell will they see _?_

The woman stood. She stood with a great and mythic effort, hoisting her own body in much the same way some legendary hero might hoist the world onto his shoulders. She stood, and she limped towards him, and she held out her hand.

“Give me the knife.”

He looked at her. Looked down at her hand. It was shaking, trembling like crazy. He could see how slick it was with sweat. Grit and blood under the nails. God, it was shaking so much.

Disbelieving, trying to find the joke, he looked up at her face. It was stone and leather, and not a gleam of insincerity. She swayed like an aspen in the wind, her unsteadiness clear and unavoidable.

“You’re…” His tongue darted out, wetting his lips. “You’re kidding, right?” It struck him that letting her do the job might be the only faster way to a knife in the heart than doing it himself. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was just that she didn’t care if he lived or died.

She didn’t dignify that with a response. Just dropped her eyes to her outstretched hand, pointedly.

Eddie thought of what his options were. Do it himself, sure. Drop the knife altogether – he probably had enough of it cut to at least make a better start on untaping himself. Or, of course, he could walk back through the door, out of this bizarre nightmare, and back into the sane world. And then, he supposed, Henry would die. He had no doubt about that. If he let Balazar down, if he got himself caught and the shipment lost… yeah. Henry was toast.

In the end, that was what decided him. That, and the certainty, the _confidence_ , in the woman’s eyes. He looked at those eyes, and against all the evidence of his own, he believed she could save him.

He grit his teeth, swallowed audibly, and handed her the knife.

For a moment, she didn’t move. She stared at her trembling hand, at the shimmer and shine of the blade that shivered in her grip.

Eddie didn’t move, either. He didn’t think he _could_. The air felt thick, somehow, heavy with… something. He had never believed in psychics or telepathy or any of that ESP bullshit, and yet, deeply and instinctively, he knew what it was he was feeling. It was the gathering of her will.

The knife in her hand shook. Trembled. Stilled.

The old woman looked up at him. Had he believed she was dying? Had he really? In that moment, the stubborn vitality baked off her with even greater heat than the fever, and Eddie Dean thought she was the most _alive_ person he had ever seen.

Still, he closed his eyes when the knife moved to his chest. No matter how impressive her willpower, no matter how steady her hand might be in that moment, he didn’t want to look if they were only for that moment. Call him a coward, but he didn’t want to watch himself gutted.

“There.” She lowered her hand, stepping back. Eddie opened one eye and realised, to his own surprise, that he wasn’t dead. “Pull it off, now. Much as ‘ee can. I’ll get the back.”

Behind him, the knocks on the door had turned to hammering. _Oh_ , he thought dimly, _guess they’ve decided they can risk the fuss_. A woman’s voice, which could hardly be less like that of the woman glaring at him as he raised his own shaking hands to his chest, called, muffled through the metal door, “Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

 _Like you give a damn_ , he thought, and almost laughed as he began, gingerly, to tug at the thick tape now hanging against his skin. It was stuck but good, and he gritted his teeth. _But as a matter of fact, sweetheart, no, I’m not all right. Pretty sure I’ve never been less all right in all my life._

“Can she hear us?” he asked, lowering his voice.

The gunslinger scoffed hoarsely. “Fuck if I know. Now _pull_!”

If the woman on the plane _could_ hear him, Eddie thought she might have her answer, because when he tore off the tape and what felt like half his skin, he couldn’t help but scream.

**XX**

Susan Deschain was not a patient woman. She often thought that it had been her biggest downfall – as a rancher, as a mother, and perhaps most of all, as a fighter.

This was the case at all times. But standing there, feeling as though every moment she _stayed_ standing was a kind of miracle clawed out of her aching and shivering bones, and watching the young man claw half-assedly at his constraints as if he couldn’t be bothered to save his own skin and hers… _that_ was agony. She felt as though she might scream. She felt the bone-deep, childish urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. _Just do the work! Just quit your fretting and your fussing and_ do _it!_

When he screamed, she almost slapped him. But that would have been just as wasteful and as inefficient as he was being, so instead, she moved to do her part. When she grabbed the remaining glue-string with both hands, out of impatient instinct, the pain rose up in a great red wave and almost felled her, a sharp reminder of her own wasteful stupidity. At least her frustration fuelled that last burst of strength she needed, and she yanked off the shiny, sticky corset around his ribs in one harsh and unrelenting pull.

He screamed again, but at least this time he tried to stifle it. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was just that the blood roaring in her ears was too loud to hear over, and that the way the world flexed and swam around her made everything muffled and distant for a moment.

She didn’t fall. There was that, at least. She caught herself against the door – was sure, for a horrible moment made more terrible by its incongruous clarity, that she would pull it closed in the process and doom them both – staggered, stumbled, and found herself teetering on the edge between worlds, her chest heaving with the effort of existence.

“Put your fucking shirt on,” she hissed. “Put it on, and get back through. Before they break down the fucking door.”

They weren’t breaking it down yet, at least. The woman was still calling through the door, but her voice hadn’t raised into a full shout, and there was no real urgency in it. She sounded like some kind of actor in a play, Susan thought, saying her lines – “Sir! Sir, we’re about to land, we really need you back in your seat!” – without conviction or feeling. A really shitty actor.

But she knew, and she was sure the Prisoner knew, that the lack of urgency was only on the other side of the door. The army stewardesses could afford to relax. They had him trapped, after all. So far as they knew, the Prisoner was just that – jailed in the confines of both the privy and the sky-carriage as a whole. So far as they knew, there was nowhere he could go.

There was an irony in that, Susan reflected, trying to reflect on _that_ and not on the damnable slowness with which the young man fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. There was a whole world he could go to. A million miles up and down this lonely, forsaken beach on the Western Sea. If he was the kind of man to survive in it, the kind of man who wouldn’t be so fucking incapable… he would have slammed the door shut as soon as he came through, and stepped over her body on the way to his new life.

That didn’t make it any easier to wait while he took a full minute to button his shirt, while the army woman went on hammering on the privy door and calling her rehearsed concern, but it did give her something to argue against her impatience.

She could have cried out in relief and frustration when, finally, he turned to face her. The look on his face was uncomfortably familiar, like a child seeking approval from its mother. Like it was the first time he’d ever dressed himself, and he wanted to know he’d done it right. Blood from his cut oozed into the faded cloth of the shirt, vivid against the patterning. God and Man Jesus, was there any sense in the man, or had it all been hollowed out by cravenness and craving?

“Wipe your belly,” she told him. The _idiot_ was silent, but still, she thought, remarkably loud. “And get rid of the other. The china white.”

He looked at her with a certain sullenness which did nothing to reduce the impression of a child looking up at its mother. “Sure. I’ll get rid of it.”

**XXI**

In his defence, Eddie told himself, as he stepped away from the crazy woman and back toward the door, his chest stinging and itching and his whole body buzzing sickly with adrenaline and withdrawals, snorting _was_ a way of getting rid of it.

**XXII**

He stepped from the sand and salt back into the poky metal bathroom. A moment later, he felt the gunslinger join him, her fever-hot intensity giving way to the cool, unyielding sense of another mind.

Eddie glanced back, curious. The door was still there. The cocaine was still there, in its mess of tape. The gunslinger was still there, too, crumpled in a grey-brown heap near the threshold, not moving. If he squinted, _really_ squinted, he could make out the slow rise and fall of her ribs. He had to wonder…

She slapped him. He _felt_ her slap him, just as if she was still standing in front of him; his head jerked to the side and he winced.

“What was _that_ for?”

 _To remind you we ain’t on leisure time._ The rasping effort was gone from her voice, but the sharp and relentless edge was not. _You want to stand here and stare at a wall till you land and they break the door down?_

No. No, of course he didn’t. He sniffled, wiping his nose on his sleeve as the heroin started to hit. It wasn’t enough to get him high, not properly, but it _was_ enough to make him feel a little better about his prospects. That, and the fact that even if his chest did sting like a son of a bitch, there was no coke strapped to it. That did a lot to raise his spirits, too.

Except…

 _Won’t they see it?_ He could have kicked himself for not thinking of this before. Maybe he really had just needed a hit, however small, to get his brain in gear. _The door. The coke. I mean…_

 _They didn’t before_ , she answered, but he thought he heard a note of uncertainty in her voice for a fraction of a moment. If it was there, though, it was quickly clamped down. _It’s been there since I opened it, and_ you _didn’t see it. Never mind it_.

It didn’t entirely convince him. Then again, what, he thought, was the alternative? Sooner or later, the bathroom door would open, and they would either see the other, impossible door, or they wouldn’t. If they _did_ see it, he was pretty sure the cocaine wouldn’t be the first thing they noticed. Hell, it had almost gone out of _his_ mind when he saw the beach. Either way, if it was going to happen, it would happen. It was just a matter of when.

 _Very zen, little brother_. Henry’s voice, nagging at the back of his mind, almost as loud as the gunslinger’s.

 _Christ_ , he thought bleakly, _it’s crowded in my head_.

He started towards the door, then stopped, his hand halfway to the locking knob. Another fist hammered on the door.

“Christ!” Out loud, this time – out as loud as he could, in fact. “I’m _busy_ in here!”

Realising, as he said it, what was missing. He turned back to the empty toilet, considered it for a moment, and then flushed.

**XXIII**

Honestly, Jane Dorning didn’t know what to think at this point. 3A was a terrorist. Then he was a drug mule. Then he was, presumably, passed out in the heads while the FASTEN SEATBELTS lights lit and the plane began its descent. She actually felt kind of worried for the guy, that was the funniest thing. She’d spent hours now watching him like a hawk, had fully intended to brain him with a fire extinguisher, but as she stood outside the toilet door watching Suzy hammer on the metal with her fist, the thought that came to her first was _Christ, what if he really is in trouble?_

And when he hollered back out at her, and when a few seconds later she heard the toilet flush, she actually felt _relief_. As if it made any sense to be relieved that the crazy drug smuggler was conscious and pissed off.

He glared at both of them as he opened the door, still tucking his ugly paisley shirt into his jeans. There was a stain on it that hadn’t been there before, and she wondered just how the fuck he’d managed to cut himself in a closed airplane bathroom. Something else was different. It wasn’t until they’d escorted him back to his seat, and she and Suzy could finally take the seats they should have been buckled into ten minutes ago, that she really registered what it was.

“He flushed it,” she said to Suzy in an undertone, as the plane began its final descent. “You see that too, right? The son of a bitch flushed it.”

Suzy looked at her, and Jane wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Suzy’s expression. It seemed caught somewhere between a kind of pride, and mild irritation, and confusion. “He didn’t.”

“But…”

“ _Stashed_ it, sure. But flushed it? Two full bags? Hell, no.” Suzy cleared her throat, aware of how the passengers were watching them with open curiosity. The scene outside the bathroom had stirred things up. Great. Now there would be rubberneckers on top of everything. “Anyway, even if he had, that shit doesn’t just disappear. It’ll be in the tank. They’ll have to test for it, is all. Now _shh_.”

Chastened, Jane shut her mouth. She could feel her face reddening, like a schoolgirl scolded by the headmistress – which made sense, because that was exactly how she felt.

Suzy cleared her throat, and got up again to reach for the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now making our final approach to Kennedy International Airport.” However else she might feel, Jane had to be impressed by how quickly and easily the older woman pulled bland professionalism back over herself, her voice sounding smooth and clipped and not at all like she’d just been pounding on a bathroom door and yelling for some guy to get his ass back to his seat. “Please ensure all cigarettes are extinguished, all baggage is suitably stowed, and that you have fastened your seatbelts.” Watching her, Jane saw Suzy’s eyes flick to 3A. “Please ensure you stay in your seats until the plane has come to a complete stop. Thank you.”

She sat back down next to Jane, and Jane considered saying something. She didn’t quite know what. _Something_ to acknowledge everything that had just happened, and the fact that it wasn’t over.

But she glanced from Suzy to the passengers, clearly craning to see if they could catch the hot gossip, and she knew she should keep her mouth shut.

Still. She ought to let it go, and like a good stewardess, she buckled herself in, put her eyes front, and kept her lipsticked mouth firmly closed and smiling. But still, as the plane descended, taxied, jolted down onto the tarmac, Jane Dorning couldn’t help but think something else stupid, something else she knew made little sense. A horrible pang of regret, a sense of injustice.

 _God_ , she thought _, I wish I could see how this all ends_.


End file.
